HUMOUR
Teachers, divorces and a legendary tale from the high seas make up the bulk of cocky’s column this month, with salient lessons to be learnt from all of the yarns...
IN THE CLASSROOM
Teacher: “Maria, go to the map and find North America.”
Maria: “Here it is.”
Teacher: “Correct. Now class, who discovered America?”
Class: “Maria!”
Teacher: “John, why are you doing your maths multiplication on the floor?”
John: “You told me to do it without using tables.”
Teacher: “Glenn, how you do spell ‘Crocodile’”?
Glenn: “K-R-O-K-O-D-I-A-L”
Teacher: “No, that’s wrong.”
Glenn: “Maybe it is wrong miss, but you asked me how I spell it.”
Teacher: “Donald, what is the chemical formula for water?
Donald: “H I J K L M N O”
Teacher: “What are you talking about, boy?”
Donald: “Yesterday you said it that it’s H to O”
Teacher: “Winnie, name one important thing we have today that we did not have ten years ago.”
Winnie: “Me!”
Teacher: “Glen, why do you always get so dirty?”
Glen: “Well, I’m a lot closer to the ground than you are.”
Teacher: “George Washington not only chopped down his father’s cherry tree, but also admitted it. Now Louie, do you know why his father did not punish him?”
Louie: “Because George still had the axe in his hand.”
Teacher: “Now Simon, tell me frankly, do you say your prayers before eating?”
Simon: “No sir; I don’t have to, because my mum is a good cook!”
Teacher: “Clyde, your composition on ‘My Dog’ is exactly the same as your brother’s. Did you copy this?”
Clyde: “No miss. It’s the same dog.”
Teacher: “Now Harold, what do you call a person who keeps on talking when people are no longer interested?”
Harold: “A teacher sir?”
CAUGHT OUT!
THE FIRST divorce directly related to the deadly terrorist attack on New York on 11 September 2001 was well publicised. It appears that a man with an office on the 33rd floor of the World Trade Centre spent the morning at his girlfriend’s apartment with his cellphone turned off.
Whilst the two of them were busy enjoying horizontal gymnastics, he was obviously not watching TV either. Then when he turned his telephone back on at about 11am, it rang immediately.
It was his hysterical wife. “Are you OK?” she shouted, “Where are you?!”
The man replied, “What do you mean? I’m at my office of course!” (By that time, of course, his office was a heap of rubble in what later became known as Ground Zero).
Mary Celeste Mystery
The ‘Mary Celeste’ has become the most famous ghost ship in maritime history. She was discovered abandoned drifting off the coast of Portugal in December 1872, relatively undamaged but without a crew. The final fate of those aboard is open to speculation: theories range from alcoholic fumes to the strange incident described in the Abel Fosdyk papers.
The ‘Mary Celeste’ was a 103 feet (31 metres) long brigantine, weighing 282 tons, originally named the ‘Amazon’ and built on Spencer’s Island, Nova Scotia in 1861. She seemed to be cursed with bad luck from the very beginning: her first captain died during her maiden voyage, and due to numerous misadventures, she changed owners several times before being driven ashore and wrecked during a storm in Grace Bay, Nova Scotia in January 1869. The ‘Amazon’ was then extensively repaired and sold to American owners who changed her name to the ‘Mary Celeste’.
On 7 November 1872 the ship picked up a cargo of industrial alcohol shipped by Meissner Ackermann & Coin and set sail from Staten Island, New York for Genoa, Italy under the command of Captain Benjamin Briggs. In addition to the captain, she carried a crew of seven men, plus the Captain’s wife, Mrs Sarah E Briggs (nee Cobb) and their two-years-old daughter, Sophia Matilda. That means that ten people were aboard on this historic voyage.
The ‘Mary Celeste’ was sighted drifting off the Portuguese coast on 4 December 1872 by the merchant vessel ‘Dei Gratia’, commanded by Captain David Reed Morehouse, who knew Captain Briggs. Morehouse’s ship had left New York harbour only seven days after the ‘Mary Celeste’, was also headed for Italy, and his crew observed her for two hours before concluding that she was drifting without flying any distress signals.
Oliver Deveau, Chief Mate of the ‘Dei Gratia’ led a small boarding party which rowed over to the ‘Mary Celeste’. He reported finding only one operable pump on the vessel, with a lot of water between decks and three and a half feet of water in the hold. Otherwise, she was in good condition, though no one was aboard. The forehatch and lazarette were both open; the ship’s clock was not functioning, and the compass was destroyed. The sextant and chronometer were missing, suggesting that the ship had been deliberately abandoned – the only lifeboat appeared to have been launched rather than torn away, and six months supply of food and water was still in the hold.
The cargo of 1,701 barrels of alcohol seemed to be intact, but when it was eventually unloaded in Genoa, it was discovered that nine barrels were empty. All of the ship’s papers except the captain’s logbook were missing. The last log was dated 24 November 1872 and placed her 100 miles west of the Azores. The final entry on the ship’s slate indicated that she had reached the island of Santa Maria on 25 November.
The crew of the ‘Dei Gratia’ divided to pump the bilges and then sail the ‘Mary Celeste’ to Gibraltar. During the subsequent hearing an admiralty court officer named Frederick Solly Flood turned the event from a simple salvage claim into almost a trial of the crew of the ‘Dei Gratia’. Flood did not hide his suspicions that he suspected foul play. The conclusion of the hearing saw the men awarded a reduced sum of prize money, thanks to Flood’s thinly veiled accusations.
None of the crew or passengers of the ‘Mary Celeste’ were ever found. Their fate remains unknown, though rumours abound. Speculation has raged from everything from mutiny, the Bermuda Triangle, and piracy to abduction by space aliens.
One popular theory is that the cargo of alcohol had released some type of gas in the hold. When a crewmember dropped a lighted match into the hold, something called a ‘smoke out’ was caused. The alcohol did not explode, but the smoke out caused the doors leading down to the keep to be blown into the air and a tongue of flame shot out from the two open hatches. Fearing that the vessel was about to blow up, the crew and passengers hastily jumped into the lifeboat and fled, later all drowning in a storm. When this theory was tested out, experiments indicated that it was feasible: the gas released by the alcohol flamed dramatically, but no destruction occurred.
There is little evidence to indicate mutiny and the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ speculation has few backers as the ship’s course would not have taken it through that area. Pirates would not have left a seaworthy ship and its cargo adrift on the open sea, and the theory of extraterrestrial beings kidnapping the crew is just too flaky: this was a 19th century seagoing vessel, after all; not the ‘Starship Enterprise’!
In January 1873 it was reported that two lifeboats were found grounded on the Spanish coast, one containing a dead body and an American flag, and the other five more corpses. There was speculation that these could have been the remains of the crew of the ‘Mary Celeste’; but this has never been confirmed and in any case the ship only had one lifeboat, not two.
Historian Conrad Byers believes that the cargo of alcohol is key to the mystery. Nine leaking barrels would cause a substantial build-up of vapour in the hold. When Briggs ordered the hold to be opened, says Byers, there was a violent rush of fumes and then steam. Captain Briggs believed the ship was about to explode and ordered everyone into the lifeboat. The crew reacted hastily, and failed to properly secure the lifeboat to the ship with a strong towline. The wind then picked up and blew the ship away from the survivors. The luckless occupants of the lifeboat either drowned or drifted away to die of thirst, hunger and exposure.
This theory was tested by scientists at University College London in 2005. A 1/16th scale reconstruction of the ship’s hold was made, using butane as the fuel and paper cubes as the barrels. The hold was then sealed and the vapour ignited. The force of the explosion blew the hold doors open and shook the scale model, which was about the size of a coffin. Ethanol burns at a relatively low temperature with a flash point of 13 degrees Centigrade (55.4 Deg. Fahrenheit), and only a minimal spark is required. None of the paper cubes were damaged, or even left with scorch marks. This may explain how the remaining cargo was found intact and also the fracture on the ship’s rail, possibly made by one of the hold doors blowing off. The sight of the alcohol vapour burning in the hold would have been dramatic and perhaps enough to scare the crew into manning the lifeboat; but the flames would not have been hot enough to have left burn marks.
A frayed rope trailing behind the boat is suggested to be evidence that the crew remained attached to the ship, hoping the emergency would pass. The ship was then abandoned under full sail and a storm blew up shortly afterwards. It is possible that the rope to the lifeboat parted with of the force of the ship under full sail. A lifeboat in a storm could easily overturn as the ‘Mary Celeste’ sailed on to weather the elements.
Another theory is that the ship encountered a ‘waterspout’: a tornado-like storm with a funnel cloud that can occur at sea. In such a case, it is suggested, the water surrounding the vessel may, in being sucked upwards, have given the impression that the ‘Mary Celeste’ was sinking. This would explain why the abandoned ship was partially flooded when boarded by the crew of the ‘Dei Gratia’. A mass panic among the crew would possibly explain the scratched railing, the broken compass and the missing lifeboat. If so, the panic must have overtaken everyone: mariners generally agree that abandoning ship is an extreme measure.
More than 40 years later, documents belonging to a deceased man named Abel Fosdyk surfaced to float another theory regarding exactly what had happened on the ‘Mary Celeste’. Fosdyk claimed that he had been a secret passenger on the ship, and in response to a light-hearted dispute with a crew member about how well a man could swim fully clothed, Captain Briggs and several crew members had jumped overboard. Fosdyk joined by Briggs’ wife and child plus the remaining crew then stepped onto a specially built deck for a better view of the fun. Suddenly, sharks attacked the swimming men, and in the ensuing panic, the viewing deck collapsed, putting the entire crew and passengers into the sea. Fosdyk landed on top of a broken plank, and became the only survivor as the others were eaten by the sharks. He floated for several days before washing ashore somewhere on the African coast. Fearful of retribution due to the outlandish details of his story, Fosdyk never told anyone of this dramatic incident, though he wrote about it later. His story has never been proven and several inconsistencies suggest that it is not true.
The author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), creator of that famous fictional super-sleuth Sherlock Holmes, sensationalised the mysterious case of the ‘Mary Celeste’ soon after the incident in a story published in 1884 entitled ‘J Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’ (part of the book ‘The Captain of the Polestar and other stories’). Conan Doyle’s account drew heavily on the original incident but included some fictional details, referring to the vessel as the ‘MARIE Celeste’. (This technique, perfected by Truman Capote in the 1950’s, has become known as ‘faction’).
Conan Doyle stated that tea was warm and breakfast was cooking in the mess-room when the vessel was discovered. Not so: the last entry in the ship’s log was eleven days before she was found crewless and drifting. These fictional additions, plus the incorrect name, have come to dominate popular accounts of the case, and were even published as fact by several newspapers at the time. The jury is still out in the case of the ‘Mary Celeste’ and I suspect it will never return with a decision.
SPORTS QUOTES
“This is really a lovely horse. I once rode her mother.” (Ted Walsh, BBC)
“Samantha Stosur just put all her balls into the court and did well to overwhelm Amelie Mauresmo, the 2006 Wimbledon Champion.” (Jo Jurie, Eurosport)
“There is certainly no way back when you have reached the point of no return.” (Sean Kelly, Eurosport)
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